Hello Daniel.

14 Feb 04 08:08, you wrote to me:

 DL> George Powell was the other person I was trying to remember.  I was on
 DL> his system too.

At the risk of saying something that'll be turned into rumour, I wouldn't
be surprised if he's died, or at the very least, moved to a remote location
in Thailand or something.  I've tried to track him down, on and off, for
years now.  I've had better luck finding childhood friends that I haven't
seen in 25 years.

 DL> I had Jawaid over to my house, and gave him his first copy of the APW
 DL> workshop.

These are the times when I recall having had a really good time working for
Quality Computers.  I have yet to see anything that equalled the religious
cult mentality that we had (and still have, to some degree) about the Apple
II.  I see some of it in the Mac community, and there are religious
elements to those who love OS/2, Linux, or BeOS -- the latter of which had
so much promise, alas -- but not quite the same.  Even hungover terribly on
a Saturday, we had a good time (Joe Gleason was stepping into the bathroom
to throw up every few minutes as the old MP6 floppy drive was demoed. :).

 DL> Cool. I'd like to do that.  I  have some half-height drives and other
 DL> stuff  for my old Apple II clone that I need to give to someone

Drop me a note and we'll find a common place and time.

 DL> bvefore they turn to rust or dust. They've been in my garage for
 DL> years.

I have an Imagewriter graveyard out in my garage.  Otherwise, you've made
me acutely aware that I need to pull my old 5.25 drives from the hot closet
and store them in a better place.  One never knows when one will need to
pull data from an old disk that one finds in a box.  "Gee, it's only
been sitting there 12 years, unused, but I need that information!"

 DL> My brother Dennis still has the Apple GS that Loderunner was
 DL> writen on,

Really?  How'd he come across that?  I presume you mean a later version of
Loderunner, given that I was playing that game in the early 80s, a bit
before the IIgs showed up ('86, IIRC).

 DL> but it is in Louisisan, which is a bit more than 30 mins
 DL> away.

I used to work with Tom Hall, most famously of id Software, and he had his
IIgs up in our offices.  I regret not spending more time talking with him
about his days at Softdisk, as I recall that he and some of the other id
guys did develop some Apple II software here and there.  While I know that
Wolfenstein GS had a long history, I was always amazed that nobody ever
ported the Commander Keen games to the IIgs.  I just fired up "Goodbye
Galaxy" for the first time in years yesterday, and it still impresses
the heck out of me like it did back in '91 or '92 (and I spent a little
time supporting the game, and it never bored me).  I admit that Apple had
long abandoned the II line by then, but this could have been another one of
those K-Fest "wow" moments.

 DL> At  some point I would like to get images made of thes
 DL> shoeeboxes full of 5.25's I have. I wonder how many can be converted
 DL> and how many will fit onto a CD or DVD.

I haven't yet pulled all my stuff from floppy disk, but I have a Quadra
whose job in life is to hold my Apple II and Macintosh files, as I sort
through my disks.  Having tired of my 2x burner, I just use Toast to burn
an ISO image, which I copy over to my PC and burn.  I've got one image for
Mac stuff, and one for Apple II stuff, and I expect that by the time I fill
up a CD, I'll have a DVD burner here anyways.  I can't believe I'll ever
fill that up with what I've got, but then again, I've seen DVDs for sale on
a2central.com.  Don't know how full they are, but I'd like to hope there's
more than a CD's worth of data to be had.  The current push to create
virtual disk images has probably helped, given that you can really cram a
ton of stuff onto a disk if you compress the images.

Steve

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